published Articles
(our latest Newsletter)

On the go with Showstoppers
-Casting mats to build a better showpiece By Beatrice S. Schneider
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Last spring I finally caught up with pastry chef Stéphane Tréand MOF, outside of Detroit, Michigan…After long days of teaching executive chefs and pastry chefs, Chef Tréand still had the energy to work on a project close to heart…The designs were conceived as he was competing for his MOF, which he was awarded in 2004.

His three different thematic designs, Waves, Flames and Herons, were to be transformed into silicone mats. Proportions, contours and bevels, as well as effective layouts were all factors carefully considered. Several 3-D mockups later, Chef Tréand signed off on …

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Introducing ShowStoppers
-Building a Better Showpiece
By Beatrice S. Schneider
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Pastry Chef Stéphane Tréand MOF and the Chicago School of Mold Making have done it again. Given the warm welcome Showpeels recieved a few years ago, they teamed up once more to create a series of new silicone tools for making pastry displays. The new mats are called ShowStoppers.

The ShowStoppers started with Chef Tréand’s three designs of Waves, Flames and Herons…

Inside this guide you'll find techniques to get the most our of your ShowStoppers.

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Fresh Take on Classic Desserts
-Platings to awaken the senses
By Beatrice S. Schneider & Jimmy MacMillan
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It’s a great time to be a pastry chef! With so many wonderful resources available and ever increasingly educated guests who seek a new dining experience, some chefs are mapping their own path to culinary innovation.

This is the mind-set of Jimmy MacMillan, a pastry chef fully in charge of his craft. Recently,
I had a chance to ask Chef MacMillan where he finds his inspiration…

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Dessert Professional Magazine: April 2010

Download Chef MacMillan's Summertime Panna Cotta Recipe

Introducing Entremets
-Producing world-class desserts
 with production efficiency
By Beatrice S. Schneider,
with Frederic Monti & Michael Joy
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Entremets – from Old French meaning “between courses,” these sophisticated desserts are meant to entertain diners with intriguing flavor combinations, coloring, and textures.

In the hands of pastry Chef Frederic Monti,
an entremets becomes a source of sensory pleasure. Chef Monti is known for his ability to develop pastry recipes that feature delicious textural combinations infused with amazing flavors…

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Dessert Professional Magazine: Dec. 2009
Download Chef Monti's Exotic Entremet recipe

Diving into Chocolate
-Tips on creating quick chocolate displays
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
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Professional chefs are always on the lookout for helpful tips and tools to bring more ingenuity and efficiency into their daily tasks. Today, the combination of silicone, chocolate and colored cocoa butter can provide a fresh recipe for artistic success. When blended with a splash of creativity, these materials can help navigate your imagination to new depths.

As Pastry Chef Stéphane Tréand MOF was completing twenty new nautical theme ShowpeelsT, he realized they had great potential to help other chefs save time in the kitchen. The thin patterned silicone sheets...

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Dessert Professional Magazine: Dec. 2008

Going for Gold, while thinking green
-working with recycled silicone-
By Michael Joy
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Every two years, the World Pastry Team Championship brings together chefs from around the world to reach for the gold medal. While the chefs work on their showpieces, the audience watches with tense excitement to see the results of their artistry and innovations. As spectacular as the chefs’ five-foot tall chocolate and sugar sculptures are, there is another—equally compelling—story behind their creation. That story consists of the second team. It’s made up of sponsors, coaches, alternate chefs, assistants, managers, creatives ...

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Pastry Art & Design Magazine: May 2008

Silicone Simplicity
Modern art with minimal effort
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy
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Some chefs have the ability to make things look easy. Pastry Chef Susan Notter is one of these people. She is among a growing number of pastry chefs being asked to provide an artistic bridge between classical hand skills and innovative new casting techniques. As a seasoned competitor, Susan knows judges want to see strength in hand skills such as pulled and blown sugar. She also recognizes that they want to be surprised with new designs and techniques...

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Pastry's Best: Feb. 2008

Calligraphy Transformation Part 1
from inspiration to presentation
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy
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Creative chefs are always looking for new designs to incorporate into their culinary artwork. While studying sculpture in art school, I learned that new ideas can often be found by looking into the past. When discussing showpiece design with chefs, I recommend they turn to calligraphy for inspiration. In fact, it doesn’t take long to find a Chinese or Japanese character whose composition has both exciting motion and appealing balance. With some slight modification, a calligraphy character can be transformed, from a two-dimensional shape into a three-dimensional form. In this article, Pastry Chef Susan Notter and I have...

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Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Dec. 2007

Calligraphy Compostiton Part 2
By Susan Notter and Michael Joy
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Susan Notter has spent more than twenty years traveling the world teaching and demonstrating sugar artistry to chefs, pastry chefs and culinary students. She is a seasoned competitor and a master of blown and pulled sugar decoration, as well a co-author and contributor to several pastry books. Mindful of the time constraints that chefs face and the realities of the industry, Chef Notter has chosen to demonstrate how quickly and easily a casting mat can be used to create modern, expressive centerpieces. ...

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Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Dec. 2007

Vinyl Clarity
By Michael Joy and Chef Anthony Chavez
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The secret is out. When smooth, glass-like transparency is needed for your sugar work, vinyl is the way to go.
Executive pastry chef Anthony Chavez from Sofitel Chicago Water Tower and Michael Joy from the Chicago School of Mold Making worked together to create unique effects for his run at the 2007 Paris Gourmet’s U.S. Pastry Competition.
Each year, chefs from around the nation gather in New York City to compete for the title of Paris Gourmet’s Pastry Chef of the Year. As with any competition, unique challenges must be overcome...

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Pastry's Best Magazine: November 2007

Casting To Win
By Michael Joy and Chef Paul Bodrogi
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Is there a place for silicone molds in pastry competitions? The 2007 Culinary Casting Challenge, sponsored by the Chicago School of Mold Making, wanted to put this question to the test. Instructed to use silicone molds in as many different ways as possible, seven student chefs came up with great answers.
A year ago, friends Paul Bodrogi and Michael Joy hatched a plan to organize a new type of pastry competition. Chef Bodrogi, an experienced competitor and pastry chef instructor at the Art Institute of Atlanta, was eager to get started. Typically, competitions place restrictions on the use of silicone molds in...

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Pastry's Best Magazine: August 2007

Rolling With Success
How to make your own textured rolling pin.
By Michael Joy
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Sometimes, to stand out in the crowd, you have to make your own equipment. A select few chefs take naturally to this, while others believe they either do not have the time, or access to special construction tools or materials. In this demonstration, we will show you how a small amount of silicone, a sheet of textured wall paper and a trip to your local hardware store can result in a highly versatile textured rolling pin. Since the rolling pin’s surface is silicone, it is ideal for adding texture to your chocolate, fondant, sugar, bread dough, pastillage and even marzipan. Because the rolling pins are not for sale, the only way to get one is to ...

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Pastry Art & Design: April/May 2007

Versatile Artistry
Creating free-form shapes with Silicone Noodles™. By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
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A few weeks ago, I caught up with Chef Tréand while he was teaching a sugar casting class at the Maui Community College (MCC) in Kahului, Maui. MCC pastry instructor, Teresa Shurilla, has hosted several prominent guest chefs including; Stanton Ho, Ewald Notter, Jacquy Pfeiffer and Drew Shotts, at their new seventeen-million dollar state-of-the art culinary academy, built by the University of Hawaii.

While in Maui, I couldn’t help but notice the irony of visiting a place where so much sugar is grown and processed, yet the high humidity ...

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Amenity On Demand
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
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Recently, I visited Chef Stéphane Treand to photograph him working on a variety of showpieces. During the photo shoot, I had to repeatedly ask him to slow down. His movements were so quick, it was difficult to get clean shots. Realizing my requests weren’t flagging his life long habits of speed and efficiency, I asked him, “What’s French for ‘slow down’?” Soon after, ‘Dus mo’ became the phrase for the day. To Stéphane, fast is his normal pace. It wasn’t until he saw the photo outtakes with him either half in or half out of the picture frame or doing too many things at once, that he gave an understanding laugh.

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Pastry's Best Magazine: Nov. 2006

Creativity Uncaged
By Keegan Gerhard & Michael Joy
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As commentator for culinary competitions such as the World Pastry Team Championships, I enjoy seeing first hand how the top pastry chefs choose to express their artistry. These days, extremely tall, clean, yet complex showpieces are likely to score well with the judges. Although pursuit of this formula can push the materials and pastry chefs to the limit, I anticipate a change. As audiences and judges become more interested and appreciative of pastry chefs who are able to uniquely express an event’s theme through concept and artistic interpretation, we are likely to see new methods of conveying themes beyond the traditional decorative techniques and color use.

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Pastry's Best Magazine: August. 2006

Sweet Fusion
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
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When encapsulation first made center stage, it was a breakthrough. Its continued pop-ularity is apparent with so many chefs eager to duplicate the effect. Competition after competition we see encapsulation get cleaner, yet not necessarily more innovative. Repeating a technique is valuable for day to day needs, but those expecting to score points with the judges must do more. To the competition chef’s credit, they have discovered pouring Isomalt on vinyl will eliminate air bubbles. They have also learned to double encapsulate shapes to prevent re-melting under the heat of a fresh pour.

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Pastry's Best Magazine: May. 2006

Showpieces on the fly
By Stéphane Tréand & Michael Joy
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When he saw Master Pastry Chef Stéphane Tréand, MOF had begun to use liquid silicone to draw on a silicone mat, Michael Joy knew he was onto something. Their collaboration combines Chef Tréand’s designs and Michael Joy’s mold making, the results are Showpeels™.
Showpeels are thin silicone sheets with pre-embossed patterns on one side. In about 15 minutes, you can cut out the pattern, dip it in hot Isomalt and peel back the silicone revealing an intricate pattern ready for use. Chef Stéphane, Executive Pastry Chef at the St. Regis Resort Monarch Beach in California knows how fast-paced professional kitchens are.

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Pastry's Best Magazine: Feb. 2006

Textured Mats made easy
By Michael Joy
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Mold making is the perfect process for chefs looking to create unique patterns and shapes not available to the public market. Textured mats are invaluable for adding flair to your pastry designs, and the good news is, they are simple to make. With the ever increasing demands pastry chefs face to be more creative with less time, this is a great technique to quickly enhance the surface of chocolate, sugar and fondant.
For this demonstration, we have chosen to make a silicone mold from textured wallpaper. If you have never made a silicone mold before, this is an excellent way to learn basic techniques while creating a beautiful and useful tool for your kitchen.

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Pastry's Best Magazine: Nov. 2005

Pastry Replica's, Quick and Easier

By Barbara Revsine
When he needed sugar and pastillage replicas of a Venetian mask to use as decorations for a party, Alexandre Bourdeaux, the pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago, contacted Michael Joy. … In a process only recently applied to pastry, the chef used the mold to create the masks in a fraction of the time that it would have taken by hand. "With silicone molds," Mr. Joy said, "a skilled pastry chef can alter, transform or combine any number of objects to create a wildly original and edible structure."

New York Times: March 24, 2004

Capitol's and Confections- Mold making at its best By Ed Lowe

Joy has worked on such diverse buildings as the Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow home in River Forest, the Playboy Mansion restoration, and other properties in the Gold Coast. Among them are the Mayfair Regency, the Belmont Cinema façade and the Mentor building. He has worked on some the terra cotta features on buildings throughout the city, though work on higher altitudes is "not his favorite pastime". ... His unquestioned artistic skills have been applied in several different areas of the arts and all of them seem somehow to revert back to his basic skills as a mold maker.

Inside Publications: May 2004

Class Evaluations,The World Pastry Forum 2003 By Diane Nickerson

"...The first class on my schedule was one of the ones I was most looking forward to, a class on silicone mold making, which was taught by master mold maker, Michael Joy. What is so interesting about Michael is that he is able to adapt his craft to the confectionery field, and to provide pastry chefs with an innovative way to create shapes and objects using a new medium. Michael demonstrated the equipment and the products necessary to create silicone molds, both food grade and non-food grade, as well as master molds. Pastry chefs were on hand to demonstrate the different techniques, uses and versatility of the molds...."
(Link to Dessert Proffessional)

Pastry Art and Design: December 2003

Mold-Making Magic
By Barbara Revsine

Creative sparks flew when Michael Joy, mold-maker extraordinaire, met Jacquy Pfeiffer, co-owner of the Chicago-based French Pastry School. Pfeiffer and partner Sebastien Canonne had seen the elaborate molds that Joy made for a chocolatier, and were convinced the technique had enormous potential for pastry chefs. … Joy an artist whose medium is silicone, and Pfeiffer, an artist whose medium is sugar and chocolate, had no trouble communicating - and even less trouble understanding how each of their talents complemented the other. "Molds give pastry chefs the tools they need to work as a 'found object' sculptor," Joy continues, "Paper, wood, glass… the list of possibilities is virtually endless. Even a flimsy piece of paper sculpture can be stabilized and preserved if it's used as the model for a mold."

Local Palate: March 2003

Making the mold; Artist restores architecture, designs desserts and sculpts, too. By Jennifer Ortega

When the Oscars needed to spruce up their time-honored award in the mid 90's, folks called Michael Joy. And when the French Pastry School in Chicago was looking to up the ante on its elegant creations, it got Michael Joy on the horn. Believe it or not, we're talking about the same guy. Boasting a career that spans from architectural restoration, model making and sculptural fabrication to mold making and casting - not to mention teaching - Art Institute educated Michael Joy decidedly has his hands full. "What ties my interests together, from commercial to pastry to restoration, is an interest in providing a bridge between industry and art," Joy said. "I want people to recognize mold-making as a valid tool to create art."